EggRage.co.uk

I’ve talked before about particularly poor practices in the SEO industry, and it probably won’t come as a surprise to you that most of these poor practices are performed by poor companies. The thing is that you may already be dealing with, or even working for a total deadbeat company, and you don’t even know it yet. Want to know how to tell if they’re one to avoid? I’ve outlined ways for you to do just that starting below.

1. When speaking to clients, they use big terms like ’search engine saturation fluctuation’, and ‘the latest Google algorithm update for it’s supplementary index’

Both of the above are techy ways of saying “your rankings have all dropped and we have no idea why, but don’t you dare think about not paying us”. This is one of the mose deceiptful underhanded tactics in (rather common) use, and is purely employed to scare the client into thinking that there is no way that they could possibly understand the inner workings of SEO.

You wouldn’t hear a designer telling a client that he couldn’t use a black font on a grey background ‘due to line-height restrictions, colour combination inter-relationships, and negative space deviation’. Yet SEO companies know that if they told the truth (IE: “we have extremely limited control over where Google ranks you”) then their business model would be deadz.

2. They have lots of ‘business awards’ posters hanging on the office walls.. but all of them are about 5 years old.

This is a sure fire way to tell that an SEO company might once have been great, but they definitely aren’t any more. A business worthy of awards gets awards, they don’t just continue to be great and suddenly fail to get any recognition. This is most common for SEO companies who started out brilliantly by helping local businesses at affordable rates, but then got some ‘big ideas’, bumped up their prices, and started trying to be a corporation rather than a business.

3. When you call them you get a “he’s in a meeting” response from the person who just had you on hold.

Here’s a piece of information for you – the overwhelming majority of SEO companies aren’t big enough for someone to need to check who’s in a meeting. Chances are that everyone is in one open plan office, and you (dear friend) are being given the fob off (again).

4. Your monthly reports don’t really tell you what work has been done.

All too often (and I seriously have seen this a lot of times now) an SEO company’s idea of a ‘report’ is a whole bunch of statistics copied and pasted onto a rather lengthy and unformatted document, but there isn’t a whole lot about what work has been carried out and how long it took.

If you’re paying an SEO company, you’re well within your rights to ask exactly what work is being done and how long each piece has taken. Don’t accept positive statistics as a sign of success – I don’t SEO this blog at all and yet it’s statistics still improve every month because I put in all the hard work at the beginning!

5. They think that link building is ’specialist work’.

I’ve got news for you.. it’s not. Link building is the process of going out onto the big wide interwebz and dropping links back to a website wherever possible. Most commonly on blog comments, forums, and business directories. This work consists of typing in a title, and a url, and can be easily completed by a 14yr old with some motivation and the offer of £20 at the end of the day. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is simply lying.

I Could Go On

And I will in part two of this post, ‘5 MORE Ways To Tell You’re With A Deadbeat SEO Compay’ next month!

SEO is a very closed industry and not rightfully so. It’s one of the few industries where it pays not to share any techniques because if your competition knew about them then they could use them – you can’t patent 301 redirects or title writing techniques.

Because of this it’s become standard to charge a lot and explain a very little – something which I personally don’t agree with. Hence the reason for this blog, to tell you exactly what works (and what doesn’t) without charging you a penny.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great and very open-minded, friendly SEO companies out there but there are a whole lot of deadbeats who only care about your money.

What do you think? Are you working for an SEO company who falls into some of the above categories? Or are you paying an SEO company and you don’t quite understand what for? Let me know in the comments!

No related posts.